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» André Leon Talley: I'm Not Gay, But I've Had 'Very Gay Experiences'

André Leon Talley: I'm Not Gay, But I've Had 'Very Gay Experiences'

For Vanity Fair's September issue, André Leon Talley, who's the editor of Numéro Russia (he left Vogue earlier this year), dishes the tea on gloves (they're important), his weight (he doesn't weigh himself) and about his sexuality. The 64-year-old says she's not gay. He's bi. Gag!

Talley tells [Vanity Fair contributing editor Vanessa Grigoriadis] of his childhood in Durham, North Carolina, where he was raised by his grandmother in the 1950s and 1960s. Bullied in his black neighborhood, Talley found solace in the fashion magazines, including Vogue, which he bought on the Duke University campus, and reading John Fairchild’s memoir of couture, The Fashionable Savages, so many times he “practically memorized it.” When Grigoriadis asks Talley if he thought he was gay, even in high school, he responds, “No, no, no. I was just into my magazines and the drawings. I had a very strict upbringing, almost puritanical. I lived there all the way through college. I was in my grandmother’s house, and I respected that!” Talley tells Grigoriadis that he rejects the “label” and says that, while he has “had very gay experiences, yes, I swear on my grandmother’s grave that I never slept with a single designer in my life. Never, ever desired, never was asked, never was approached, never, ever bought, in my entire career. Never. Not one. Skinny or fat. Never.” Talley also tells Grigoriadis that he has never been in love with a man—only two women: one a fellow student in Providence, the other a society woman with whom he fell in love after a night of dancing in Manhattan and whose name he declines to share because she later married and had children. On being single, Talley says, “I just said to a friend, ‘I can create this magic, so why don’t I have a lover?’” But, he tells Grigoriadis, “if I was a couple, I wouldn’t like to stay in the same bedroom. It is very un-chic in Europe to sleep in the same bedroom.”